The present disclosure relates generally to the field of personal information management and more specifically, to synchronizing and updating personal information, such as contact and address information, between multiple interfaces connected to a network.
Maintenance of up-to-date contact information between friends, family, business associates, clients, and customers has always been a challenging and a difficult task to manage. More frequently than expected, people change at least some of their contact information, such as phone numbers, fax numbers, mobile phone numbers, electronic mail addresses, physical addresses, and the like. As one example, presently approximately 35% of Internet users change electronic mail addresses annually, approximately 33% of mobile phone numbers are changed annually, and approximately 40 million physical addresses change every year.
Maintenance of up-to-date contact information between friends, family, business associates, clients, and customers has always been a challenging and a difficult task to manage. More frequently than expected, people change at least some of their contact information, such as phone numbers, fax numbers, mobile phone numbers, electronic mail addresses, physical addresses, and the like. As one example, presently approximately 35% of Internet users change electronic mail addresses annually, approximately 33% of mobile phone numbers are changed annually, and approximately 40 million physical addresses change every year. Out-of-date contact information leads to personal losses, such as friendships, and business losses, such as missed opportunities that could increase productivity and revenue. For example, inaccurate and low-quality customer data results in bad mailings and staff overhead costing upwards of $600 billion a year to U.S. businesses.
To help manage this large amount of contact related data a number of personal information manager (“PIM”) applications have evolved, e.g., Microsoft Outlook®, Eudora Pro®, and the like, for a variety of devices, e.g., personal computers (“PC”), personal digital assistants (“PDA”), smart phones and mobile telephones. Nevertheless, users continue to be challenged with respect to maintaining consistency or separation of information as the number interfaces on which such information resides increases.
Many times, contact related data or contact information is also stored in web mail services such as Google GMail or Yahoo! Mail in addition to PIM applications. With contact information stored in multiple locations, maintenance of the contact information has become even more difficult. In conventional systems, synchronization occurs between the two applications to create one master list of contact information storing the updated contact information.
In conventional synchronization systems, each application exports the contact information and the information is used to update the master list of contact information. A drawback with conventional synchronization systems is that an accurate list of contact information is generally not maintained. In conventional synchronization systems, importing data into the master list of contact information merely adds contact information to the master list resulting in duplicate contact information as many conventional applications are difference unaware information repositories which are only capable of exporting the current state of the stored data. Difference unaware information repositories are not able to and have no need to track changes that occur in the contact information. Thus, tasks such as importing data from difference unaware information repositories during synchronization does not account for information that was deleted or edited from one of the applications. This results in an inaccurate master list of contact information as the deleted contacts continue to be present in the master list of contact information.
To help resolve problems with conventional applications which are difference unaware information repositories, individuals can store contact information in difference aware (e.g., delta aware or full access) applications. Difference aware applications such as Microsoft Outlook®, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Address Book and Microsoft Windows Live Contacts are able to keep record of the changes made to information stored within the application, so that only these changes are accounted for during synchronization. Issues in maintaining accurate contact information arise when users store contact information in both difference aware applications and difference unaware information repositories. Even these difference aware applications have limitations with respect tracking changes in contact information that is retrieved from convention repositories that simply export data. The difference aware applications receive all the contact information stored in the difference unaware repositories during synchronization to update its contact information and are not capable of determining the changes made to the contact information in the difference unaware information repository. Thus, the problem of maintaining an accurate contact information list still is present as contact information is not correctly updated during synchronization of a difference aware application and a difference unaware information repository.
Hence, the present state of the art lacks, inter alia, a system and process to synchronize information with information repositories that are only difference unaware.